Part of Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency’s (DARPA’s) Ultra-performance Nanophotonic Intrachip Communication program, the project commences with an incremental delivery of $8.1 million to Sun Microsystems’s microelectronics and laboratories divisions.
Building on research done under DARPA’s High Productivity Computing Systems program, Sun’s new project will accelerate the development of lower cost, high performance and high productivity systems. The project presents a unique opportunity to develop supercomputers through interconnecting an array of low-cost chips, with the potential to overcome the fundamental cost and performance limits of scaling up today’s large computer systems.
By providing unprecedented high bandwidth, low latency, and low power interconnections between the parallel computing chips in such an array, this research project will help enable a broad class of companies and organizations to utilize applications with high compute and communication requirements, such as energy exploration, biotechnology and weather modeling.
